Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Margaret Drabble: Career and Critics
- 2 Narrative Structure in Drabble's Works
- 3 Spots of Time: Managing a Focused Narrative
- 4 An Event Seen from an Angle
- 5 What Was the Point of Knowing What Was Right (If One Didn't Then Do It)?
- 6 I Do Not Care Very Much for Plots Myself (But I Do Like a Sequence of Events)
- 7 Reading the Plot of the Past
- 8 Mothers and Others
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
2 - Narrative Structure in Drabble's Works
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Margaret Drabble: Career and Critics
- 2 Narrative Structure in Drabble's Works
- 3 Spots of Time: Managing a Focused Narrative
- 4 An Event Seen from an Angle
- 5 What Was the Point of Knowing What Was Right (If One Didn't Then Do It)?
- 6 I Do Not Care Very Much for Plots Myself (But I Do Like a Sequence of Events)
- 7 Reading the Plot of the Past
- 8 Mothers and Others
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Natural curiosity - to find out what and why things happen - is the main reason for reading or listening to a narrative, and a narrative basically is an account of a series of events linked by cause and effect; inasmuch as there is a strong emphasis on cause and effect, this chain of events can also be referred to as plot, another term which has been widely discussed and probed. Traditional narrative theory focuses on the role of the writer in choosing, emphasizing and explaining the rational links between plot events, and more recent critics have stressed the way that the reader accepts, rejects, infers or imagines the links. Margaret Drabble's novels vary in the amount of interpretation required of the reader: even in an early novel like A Summer Bird-Cage where the reasons for events are carefully explained, there is still an area of uncertainty for the reader as to the motives of the characters; and conversely, even in the later The Middle Ground, which avoids a final solution, some firm and convincing reasons for its characters’ behaviour appear.
As the title of A Natural Curiosity implies, curiosity about causes is important in revealing the workings of the plot, and the power and limitation of curiosity about causes is probed and explored. ‘I want to know what really happened’ (NC 75) says one of the characters in that novel, and the possibility of finding out what and why things happen is a goal to which characters themselves repeatedly address themselves, though often to be frustrated. Margaret Drabble has said:
What I usually do is take characters who are reassessing how they've got to be what they are, rather than showing, as in a Bennett novel, the time span viewing how they become it. I admire people who can do the longer time span. But I tend to look back rather than carry them through the course of the book. I find it more interesting for some reason.
This means that cause and effect are foregrounded, as the characters probe into their past, and although it is not true that all Drabble's novels reject forward-moving plots, large parts of most of them are taken up with reminiscences, memories, investigations, family histories and other material that could help to give a clarification of why the character has reached this stage in his or her life.
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- Margaret Drabble , pp. 9 - 15Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004